A plethora of stars cannot salvage this story.
I’m a sucker for animated movies. So when I saw the trailer for The Tale of Despereaux, I HAD to see it. This, sometimes, leads me to hating trailers. In this particular case, you’ve seen the best and funniest parts of the movie in this trailer. Narrated by Sigourney Weaver (Vantage Point), The Tale of Despereaux never grabbed your interest. Sure the animation was great, but the story wandered too often in lengthy asides on characters no one cared about. Every character that had a knot in the plot was expanded upon unnecessarily, and made the movie drag on needlessly. The story, a simple damsel in distress fare, felt flat and dragged you down in its overbearing melancholy. Despereaux (Mathew Broderick) is the only uplifting character but the burden of carrying the movie was too much for this little mouse…even if he did have big ears.
While the voice acting was loaded with stars (Emma Watson, Dustin Hoffman, Tracey Ullman, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci), the combined shine of their star power couldn’t salvage the poor (if accurate) retelling of the book by Kate DiCamillo. The Tale of Despereaux suffered from insufficient pruning and an unengaging narrator, hampering what could have been a wonderful story with delightful characters.
